Dire Straits Ride The Funfair For ‘Tunnel Of Love’ Performance Video
The clip features the group playing the track from ‘Making Movies’ on the ‘Rockpop in Concert’ show in Germany in 1980.
The official Dire Straits YouTube channel has shared a vintage performance by the band of “Tunnel Of Love.” It features the group playing the track from their third album Making Movies on the Rockpop in Concert show in Germany on December 19, 1980, as they continued their unstoppable rise to worldwide success.
In January, a clip was unveiled from the same show, featuring both “Down To The Waterline” and “Lions,” also licensed from ZDF Enterprises. Making Movies had been released a few weeks before the band’s appearance on the German show, on October 17, and “Tunnel Of Love” was chosen as the first single from it a week later.
Featuring an introductory quotation from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Carousel Waltz, “Tunnel Of Love” soon became a favorite moment in Dire Straits’ live shows. Surprisingly, for such a signature track, it only reached No.54 in the UK chart, but was notably more successful in parts of Europe, especially in Italy, where it was later certified gold.|
In 1984, Mark Knopfler spoke to The Times about the satisfaction of finding inspiration as a songwriter, relating it to this particular track. “It’s the moment when you know you’re really on to something,” he said. “It happened to me when I was writing ‘Tunnel of Love.’ There’s a certain part of the song that I call the breakdown and when I got there I could feel the drums, the piano, all the things that I wanted all the instruments to do. When you get to that state, there’s a strange sense of one thing following another, of elements falling into place quite naturally.”
As often in his work, Knopfler weaved elements of his own upbringing into a fictitious scenario for the storyline of “Tunnel Of Love.” The “Spanish City” of the lyric referred to the funfair he visited as a child in Whitley Bay, some seven miles down the eastern coast of England from Blyth, where he grew up. It made for a suitably filmic image in the cinematic ambience of Making Movies, and the song had an odd connection to the 1987 Bruce Springsteen composition of the same name, in that keyboard player Roy Bittan played on both numbers.
Listen to the studio version of “Tunnel Of Love” on the album Making Movies.
